Satin Doll (33 page)

The regally beautiful woman in the mirrors stiffened. “You didn’t even read it, did you?”
 

He held himself away from her slightly so that he could look down into her face. “Sammy, sweetheart, you’ve got every right to be pissed off with me and—”
 

“Me?” she said, suddenly pushing him away. “I’m a queen, a goddess, remember? I couldn’t be pissed off with you. It wouldn’t be good for my image. And you’re always telling me what’s good for my image, right?” She lifted one side of her glittering skirts in her hand and stepped back, wanting to get around him to the door. “Jack, I’m tired. This is no time to talk to me right now. I’m liable to say anything. But you know,” she said in a deep breath, “I was yours for almost two years because you pressed all the right buttons, you knew just what to do with somebody like me—a nothing from nowhere, a dumb, inexperienced girl who was hungry and ambitious.” She faced him, her chin up. “I let you turn me into Sam Laredo, I let you take me to bed, I let you make me fall in love with you, I even let you get rid of me when you got ready! Do you want me to fall on my knees right now in the middle of—of what’s going on here, just because you want to tell me you’re going to divorce your wife?”
 

“Ah, Sammy,” he sighed. He didn’t move, his big body blocking her way to the door. “Do you want me to apologize? Okay, so I’m a bastard, I don’t excuse my own faults. I know I’m throwing everything at you at once, baby,” he said contritely, holding her with the sheer, mesmerizing power of his marvelous voice. He was being Jack Storm at his most persuasive. “But, Sammy, I need you. I took a flight to Paris to tell you I’m going to give you the world this time, lover. You’re going to have everything you want. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
 

She knew, staring at him, that he hadn’t understood a word she had said. “Hells afire,” she burst out, “you’ve been in this business a long time. Don’t you know what happened out there today? The retrospective should have fallen on its face, except some poor kid who works for Rudi Mortessier shot himself, and these people didn’t have any place to go to compare news bulletins except here!”
 

She pushed him out of her way with both hands and grabbed the doorknob. “You don’t want me, Jack. I’m no queen, no goddess. I’m still just Sammy Whitfield. I’m just as much a loser now as I was as Sam Laredo! You’d be making a mistake, believe me. As big a mistake as you made when you dumped me here in Paris!”
 

“Okay, okay,” he soothed her. He lifted both hands, palms outward and stepped back. “You’re upset, darling. You’re tired and you’ve been through a hell of a lot. I’m not going to push you. Go out and see your fans, have your day in the sun. Believe me, you deserve it. Dennis and I are going up to the offices here. You come up when things settle down. Tell me,” he said, opening the door for her, “where’s this Doumer broad who’s supposed to be in charge?”
 

To his surprise, Sam began to laugh. She swept past him without another word and into the crowded corridor.
 

“I remember Claude Louvel,” the great gray eminence of the
New York Times
fashion pages was saying over the roar of the voices in the salon. “I was doing public relations for
Harper’s Bazaar
in Paris in the 1950s and I’m sure I saw one or two of her showings here.” The
Times
editor had pinned Sam in the jostling crowd, holding her drink carefully shoulder high to keep it from splashing. “Frankly, I always thought she was good. Whatever happened to her? Somebody told me she died.”
 

“Weren’t you Sam Laredo jeans?” the woman from the
San Francisco Examiner
wanted to know. She bent toward Samantha, squinting at her hair scraped back in the knot crowned by pearls and gauze butterflies. “I loved you in the jeans ads, but this is a total transformation. So very Paris, really. Is this going to be Jack Storm’s new look for you? Are you going to take over Louvel’s?”
 

Jane Pauley of NBC and Joan Lunden of ABC were converging on them through the crowd. “I liked the feel for all that fifties nostalgia,” the
Times
editor said, raising her voice, “especially those extraordinary models. And the potted palms were a stroke of genius.”
 

The
San Francisco Examiner
woman said, “You know that was old Alphonsine L’Espinous in the back row, don’t you, the Count of Paris’s cousin? That was really a coup, all the old Louvel customers, fantastic atmosphere. How about letting me set up an interview with some of them?”
 

Someone handed Samantha a glass of champagne. She held it in her hand, staring at it rather numbly. The Maison Louvel bag ladies had been getting more than their share of attention. A news photographer had materialized from somewhere and was snapping shots of the aristocratic oddities, who were posing like movie queens at the far end of the room. “Who’s the Count of Paris?” was all she could say.
 

“Where’d the Medivani kid go?” the
New York Times
editor said, looking around. “That was a shocker, when she walked in. I thought the prince had her under wraps.”
 

“Her bodyguards dragged her out when she fell on the floor during the cocktail dresses,” the
Examiner
woman put in. “Didn’t you see it?”
 

“Actually, I think Jackson Storm is preparing a statement about everything,” Sam murmured. “It should be released shortly.” No one seemed to hear her.
 

“I’m going to have to set up an interview,” the
Times
editor was deciding, “and come back with a photographer and go through Louvel’s. This place is a veritable museum. We ought to be able to get some kind of feature out of it. We could slot it for some time around Halloween. Put it on the front page of the Sunday fashion section, probably. But I can’t commit myself to anything this far in advance until we see our space.”
 

The fashion features editor from UPI grabbed Sam’s arm. “This day’s been such a mess with the Mortessier thing breaking I didn’t have a photographer assigned to your show. Can we come back and do some stills here after the Dior showing Thursday?”
 

“—still in surgery,” the
Elle
magazine representative shouted to Kitty O’Hare. “Lisianne’s not at Galanos, I just telephoned there.”
 

“—do it now for Radio France,” a small dark-haired woman said at Sam’s elbow, “if we can find a quiet room somewhere.”
 

The noise of more than a hundred voices beat in Sam’s ears. The Maison Louvel retrospective, that crazy idea that should have been sure disaster, was a smashing success; she still couldn’t believe it. But now, on the brink of worldwide recognition of the Maison Louvel, Jack Storm was pulling out—what he’d planned to do all along. He had come to Paris with Dennis Wolchek and Peter Frank to close it out, and what the Storm King’s empire would have was a mountain of valuable publicity.
 

So with the bad, the good, Sam was thinking. The cards that had been dealt by a slightly cross-eyed fate had turned up wildly confused; it was beyond her, right at that moment, to make any sense of it. Except that the news media wanted the story. No one seemed to want to go on to the luncheon and fur show at the Crillon; the shouted conversations around her were either about the retrospective or the latest news on the condition of Gilles Vasse. From the way the crowd was flowing up the grand staircase to the upper floors, the fashion press corps were going through the Maison Louvel building in search of telephones.
 

Then, through the crowd, she saw a tall, beautiful man standing in the doorway of the salon, his hair slightly wet with rain. He seemed to be looking for someone.
 

“Excuse me,” Sam murmured, pushing away from the
New York Times
editor and the television newswomen. She grabbed the heavy gown in both hands and waded through the jam of bodies toward the doors.
 

Alain was there. For the first time that day the world seemed to come into brilliant focus, and Alain des Baux was at the center of it.
 

Chip had unplugged the wires to the sound equipment and was rolling them up around his forearm. He started toward her, black brows drawn together in a frown, but a surge of French magazine people pushed him back.
 

“Sorry to be late,” Alain called over the noise. He waited until Sam reached the doors, then looked down at her, a slow smile lifting the corners of his mouth. “Business detained me. I couldn’t get here any sooner.”
 

He stepped onto the landing where the crowd was thinner. “Do you know how you look in that dress?” His eyes were glowing. “My God, but you are beautiful.”
 

She threw herself against him. “Just get me out of here,” Sam cried. “Right now!”
 

Chapter Nineteen

After coffee, Alain had gone to take a call on the library telephone. Alone for the first time since that morning, Samantha leaned her elbows on the stone balustrade of the terrace and inhaled deeply of the sweltering July night, the scent of mimosa blooming in the garden.
 

“It’s only another fortified country house,” he had said with his usual well-bred deference, “certainly nothing to compare with the great chateaux of the Loire valley, but I think you will like it.”
 

She should have known what Alain’s house would be like. When the Lamborghini drove through the electronically controlled iron gates topped with the coat of arms of the des Baux, Sam saw the half-mile-long avenue of ancient trees that led to a towered and moated seventeenth-century manor house. She knew his cousin’s estate in Versailles, by comparison, was only a nice suburban residence.
 

They had taken an early dinner on a terrace overlooking formal gardens that were, after several centuries of relentless grooming, verdant fantasies of clipped hedge, sparkling fountains and walks with vistas of ornamental Greek temples and classical statuary that faded away into a twilight horizon of tall trees. The table set for two on the wide terrace overlooking the fountains was covered with an exquisite rosepoint lace cloth that touched the stone floor. The only light was a huge eighteenth-century silver candelabrum of Venetian design. The points of the candle flames, almost motionless in the hot, still July night, were reflected in tall crystal goblets, two-hundred-year-old Sevres plates and carved and gold-handled silverware so ancient the designs were worn smooth with use. While a middle-aged couple served the meal, music came through the open doors of the library, the stereo playing a selection of old Charles Aznavour tunes sung by the famous French artist himself in his smoky voice.
 

Afterward Alain had gone to take his urgent telephone call, and Sam watched the moon come up and spangle the waters of the moat below.
 

A moat, she marveled, looking down into the deep water-filled ditch that surrounded the house. There was even a drawbridge over which the Lamborghini had purred. After the unbelievable day, it was even more unbelievable to be dropped down in such a setting. But she was there, Sam reminded herself, closing her eyes for a brief moment. There with Alain, and that was all that mattered.
 

She had just walked out of the Maison Louvel. It was not the right thing to do, perhaps. Not when it was still filled with the fashion press, when Brooksie, Nannette and Sylvie were still in the changing room trying to restore some order, and when Jack Storm was upstairs with his comptroller and development head waiting for Sam to join them. But she told herself she was glad to leave them to analyze what had been accomplished and do the cleaning up without her. Brooksie had the rest of her money, the models’ bill was paid and she had left bonuses for Nannette and Sylvie in envelopes on the work-order spike in the atelier. There was nothing left for her to do. When she came back...
 

If
she came back, Sam thought, staring down at the beautiful summer moon reflected in the water below.
 

It had been easy enough to go upstairs unnoticed and take off the extravagant ball gown at last, leaving it a pool of white silk and glitter on the floor, change into her jeans and a shirt and come back downstairs through the crowds to find Alain waiting. In the tunnel, he drew her to him quickly and kissed her passionately. “You are sure?” he murmured. “You want to go away with me now, leaving them”—he nodded his head upward—”like this?”
 

Yes, she was sure. No matter what the events that had taken place in the Maison Louvel that morning, this was all that mattered now. She was with the man she loved, alone with him for a few days in this beautiful place.
 

Sam looked at her wristwatch again. She supposed Alain was still talking on the telephone, but she wished he’d hurry; if she stood there much longer her deliriously happy feeling was in danger of melting away, to be replaced by the creeping tiredness that came on when she had time to think.
 

She was, she told herself, setting her jaw a little stubbornly, going to have her own chance at happiness, entering a love affair this time with her eyes wide open, knowing Alain was a titled French aristocrat already engaged to a young girl his family found suitable. Well, she could deal with that; she’d been thinking it over the past few days after the trip to the de Bergerac house in Versailles, and she knew that she loved Alain. With a little luck this time it would work out. Besides, she had to admit she didn’t exactly come to Alain without a past of her own. She’d made some terrible mistakes, there was no getting around that. Some day she would have to tell Alain about Jack Storm.